Exhaustion is a strategy. What looks like collective fatigue is actually the consequence of a carefully engineered mechanism designed to rob us of our power — our power to resist, to imagine, to protect each other and to create sustainable change. Burnout is many things, including an effective political tool for our oppressors.
According to the American Psychological Association, more than 77 percent of the U.S. population considers the future of the nation a significant source of stress — a figure that has climbed steadily since 2016. But these aren’t just abstract statistics. They reflect a measurable deterioration in our collective capacity to engage.
Crisis-focused news triggers stress responses that can last days, meaning many of us never fully recover between news cycles. We’re caught in a loop of headline anxiety and breaking news, leaving us socially and politically aware, but mentally worn out.
This exhaustion isn’t accidental. We’ve faced a rapid succession of crises in recent years: a global pandemic, economic ruptures, ecological devastation, genocides, state-sanctioned violence and political upheavals. Each crisis demands our full attention before we can process the last, creating a perfect storm of overwhelm.
Our political landscape is built on this foundation of constant crisis, where the next catastrophe is looming just around the corner. Take Project 2025, for instance. This isn’t just another political initiative — it’s a masterclass in overwhelming the public consciousness. When the Heritage Foundation released this 900-page policy blueprint, most people couldn’t process its full implications. How could they? The document proposes radical changes to executive power, civil service and democratic safeguards, but its sheer volume makes meaningful public engagement nearly impossible. Then came the strategic confusion: Trump claimed no knowledge of the document, yet his early executive actions aligned precisely with its objectives. This isn’t just political maneuvering — it’s a deliberate strategy of cognitive overload. By the time we’ve parsed one aspect of the plan, three new controversies have emerged, each demanding our immediate attention. The mental labor required to track these contradictions, to separate truth from theater, is itself part of the exhaustion strategy.
The manipulation of our attention through corporate news and social media platforms has created a vicious cycle keeping us tired enough to question whether we should continue fighting, but fearful and outraged enough to keep consuming distressing news. Our nervous systems stay in constant disarray, significantly impacting our ability to organize, resist and envision change. The result? A population both hypervigilant yet immobilized.
This dynamic serves our capitalist system perfectly: Exhausted and hopeless workers rarely fight for better conditions. While genuine human connection sustains us, the technological acceleration of exhaustion — driven by algorithmic manipulation and manufactured urgency — acts as a perfect delivery system for political and social burnout.
Understanding this as a tool of control transforms how we fight back. Our collective burnout isn’t an unfortunate side effect of modern life — it’s the intended outcome of a system that profits from our disengagement and our hyperproductivity. Declining rates of civic participation aren’t just about apathy — they’re symptoms of a systematically exhausted population.
When oppressive systems are used to isolate and exhaust us, carrying this heaviness together becomes an act of defiance. This means creating tangible support structures: rotating leadership roles in community organizations, establishing local mutual aid networks and building communication systems that don’t rely solely on privately owned social media platforms. It looks like community care collectives providing child care during organizing meetings, mental health support networks and taking turns monitoring political developments so everyone has a chance to rest.
Project 2025 isn’t just another political initiative — it’s a masterclass in overwhelming the public consciousness.
Consider Bed-Stuy Strong, a mutual aid network that emerged in Brooklyn in response to the COVID-19 crisis; it has evolved into a vibrant online hub and ecosystem of care, bringing together a diverse group of community members. More than 3,000 individuals — from service workers and artists to software engineers and long-time residents — are collaborating to reimagine how to safeguard their collective well-being and address gaps through shared resources. At this critical moment, we must create systems that prevent burnout while ensuring consistent community support. This will require us to develop rotating volunteer schedules and implement “pause periods,” where different working groups take turns stepping back to rest and recover while others step forward. When resources are stretched thin, the answer isn’t pushing individuals harder — it’s weaving a more substantial web of mutual support through community partnerships and collaborative care networks. It is easy to fall back on individual responses to burnout — taking personal mental health days, practicing self-care or temporarily disconnecting from news and social media. While these actions are essential and provide relief, they can also reinforce the cycle of exhaustion. We return to our activism or the ebbs and flow of life, feeling guilty for stepping away or playing catch-up with the list of latest crises. The real power lies in building systems that make care and wellness a collective practice rather than an individual responsibility.
Our exhaustion was meant to isolate us; instead, it reveals the threads of our common struggles. It was designed to make us surrender; instead, it shows us exactly where to push back, what areas in our concepts of solidarity require mending. In recognizing our fatigue as deliberately engineered, we expose the system’s fundamental fear: that despite their best efforts to wear us down, we will always find ways to resist together.
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
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